Volleyball Opening Weekend - Referee Issues

Families - we received this information from the league this morning. We wanted to share this information so everyone was in the loop on what occurred with the referees not showing up.

Dear Coordinator,

As you may know, this weekend, mainly Saturday, we had officials that did not show up to their games. I wanted to take a moment and provide you an explanation. This summer we hired a professional assignor and began the process of upgrading the officials who work GCCYS games. Our goal is to use OHSAA Certified officials like we do in basketball. Our new assignor has a roster of over 200 certified officials and we planned on certifying the former non-certified GCCYS officials. We discovered that the former assignor had promised that children could officiate games. We could not honor this promise because having a minor officiate is a liability that we cannot assume. Additionally, we discovered that misinformation was given to the former GCCYS officials about the intent to certify and why we moved to a professional assignor. Long story short, several officials decided to "protest" by not showing up to the games they were assigned. The issue was compounded since around the city, high schools were running tri-matches and there was a large tournament. We actually had other assignor calling to see if we had officials.

Going forward, we do not anticipate any more games without officials. We have assigned most the the season and will have it completed by the time we resume matches after the labor day weekend. The officials who "protested" have been removed from our roster and will not be asked back. I hate that this happened as it only hurt the children. I do believe we are past this nonsense and the players will no longer be impacted.